Category: Provisioning

We have covered multiple blogs on how to use Terraform to help automate the provisioning of environments and treat your Infrastructure as Code. Until now, for PaaS stacks, we have used Terraform together with Oracle PaaS Service Manager (PSM) CLI. This gives us great flexibility to script our own tailored PaaS stacks the way we want them. However, with flexibility comes responsibility, and in this case, if we choose to use PSM CLI, it’s up to us to script the whole provisioning/decommission of components that make up the stack. As well as what to do if we encounter an error half-way through, so that we leave things consistently.

A simpler way to provision PaaS stacks is by making use of Oracle Cloud Stack, that treats all components of the stack as a single unit, where all sub-components are provisioned/decommissioned transparently for us. For example, Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) stack, is made of Oracle DB Cloud Service (DBCS), Integration Cloud Service (ICS), Process Cloud Service (PCS), Visual Builder Cloud Service (VBCS), IaaS, storage, network, etc. If we use Oracle Cloud Stack to provision an environment, we only have to pass a YAML template with the configuration of the whole stack and then, Cloud Stack handles the rest. Pretty awesome huh?

Similarly, as we have done in the past, we are going to use a “Build Server”. This will be used as a platform to help us provision our PaaS stacks. When provisioning this “Build Server”, I will add all the tooling it requires as part of its bootstrap process. For this, I am using Vagrant + Terraform, so that I can also treat my “Build Server” as “infrastructure as code” and I can easily get rid of it, after I built my target PaaS stack.

This is a graphical view of what I will be doing in this blog to provision an OIC stack via Cloud Stack:

In this blog, I am going to get you started with Oracle PaaS Service Manager (PSM) CLI – A great tool to manage anything API-enabled on any Oracle PaaS Service or Stack. For example, provisioning, scaling, patching, backup, restore, start, stop, etc.

It has the concept of Stack (multiple PaaS services), what means that you can very easily provision and manage full Stacks, such as Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC), that combines multiple PaaS solutions underneath, e.g. ICS, PCS, VBCS, DBCS, etc.

For this, we are going to use a pre-cooked Vagrant Box/VM that I prepared for you, so that you don’t have to worry about installing software, but moving as quickly as possible to the meat and potatoes.

Very quickly Git has become one of the most common ways to maintain and manage source code. It is easy to use, fast, reliable and most modern CI/CD tooling support it. GitHub also makes it easy to anyone who wants to share code, to do it in a free or very inexpensive way. Many companies however, also look for ways in which they can maintain their own private repositories as an enterprise-grade solution, like Developer Cloud Service (DevCS), the one Oracle gives for free with any IaaS or PaaS service.

In this blog I am going to show you how to push your code into any number of remote Git repositories. For example, you can have your private repository in DevCS and choose to also publish them into another GitHub remote repository (public or private) in GitHub.

Infrastructure as Code is becoming very popular. It allows you to describe a complete blueprint of a datacentre using a high-level configuration syntax, that can be versioned and script-automated. This brings huge improvements in the efficiency and reliability of provisioning and retiring environments.

Terraform is a tool that helps automate such environment provisioning. It lets you define in a descriptor file, all the characteristics of a target environment. Then, it lets you fully manage its life-cycle, including provisioning, configuration, state compliance, scalability, auditability, retirement, etc.

Terraform can seamlessly work with major cloud vendors, including Oracle, AWS, MS Azure, Google, etc. In this blog, I am going to show you how simple it is to use it to automate the provisioning of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure from your own laptop/PC. For this, we are going to use Vagrant on top of VirtualBox to virtualise a Linux environment to then run Terraform on top, so that it doesn’t matter what OS you use, you can quickly get started.

We were looking into some of the VM images that we have. Some of them were very useful but we were wanting to host them in the cloud for the upcoming workshops.

Ravello is a cloud service that allow you to import and manage your VMs or stacks of VMs on public cloud. The interesting part of this is that the service can use our cloud infrastructure or a third party cloud. Ravello manages the costs but also adds simple capability to manage your VMs better.

Here’s a quick guide to putting VMs (I did a VirtualBox image but it can be any type) in the Oracle Cloud with Ravello.

Modern Integrations require touching lots of different APIs coming from multiple “systems”. These “systems” can be big enterprise backend applications, such as: E-Business Suite, SAP, JDE, Siebel, etc. As well as modern SaaS Applications, such as: Service Cloud, ERP Cloud, Salesforce, Netsuite, Workday, etc. These “systems” can also be other smaller or custom applications running either on premise or in the cloud exposing either SOAP or REST services.

Rarely any of these “systems” can provide solid abilities to remotely expose APIs in a way that are tailored for a specific business case. Commonly, to achieve this, we need a separate integration layer that orchestrates APIs from multiple “systems” and easily obtain the desired business outcome, in a way that they are also reusable APIs to be utilise in other business scenarios. Furthermore, in order to properly apply security measures and effectively protect these APIs and safely expose them to external consumers (potentially in the public Internet), normally we need to use an API Gateway (see this blog to learn how).

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